Thursday, May 20, 2010

Those who run multiple operating system on a single machine and need to frequently reboot from one to another, know how tedious it is to sit around waiting for the boot screen to load so that you may select the operating system to boot. The boot manager, on the other hand, doesn’t wait for you. If you don’t act within a specified time frame it will swiftly boot into the default selection, and if that happens you have start all over again.

So here are two tools that enables you to select the next operating system to boot even before you shutdown the current OS, right from system tray. This allows you to move away from the computer and brew yourself a nice cup of coffee while the computer reboots and loads the chosen operating system.

iRebootis one such tool that is useful if you have multiple version of Windows installed like Windows XP, 7 and Vista. iReboot only works on the Windows bootloader so it won’t work if you use another bootloader, which happens when you dual boot Linux and Windows.

If you dual (or triple and more) boot Linux and Windows, try grub choose default. grub-choose-default is a straight forward application that offers you a GUI that you can use to easily select the next default for grub and you can go and grab a snack while your computer reboots without having to wait for anything.

The best thing about grub choose default is that it works under both Linux and Windows.